In the wake of devastating building collapses in factories in Bangladesh and Cambodia, the high cost of cheap production has once again been laid bare. It behooves us all to read labels. Here we profile ten designers who can trace the who, what, and where of their collections.

It’s easy for Creatures of the Wind’s Christopher Peters and Shane Gabier to say who’s shipping and stitching together their collections because they’re the ones lugging boxes to FedEx and sewing sweaters at Peters’ parents’ kitchen table in New Jersey. “We did, and still do, a lot of it ourselves,” Gabier says. In those first few seasons, a DIY approach is the only way a growing business can survive. And yet, even as the two-and-a-half-year-old label expands, quality manufacturing and accountability remain priorities. “Our end goal is to make beautiful things, and as an extension of that, everything along the way has to be done in a certain way,” Peters says.

Or as Gabier puts it, “Ultimately, if we’re going to add to this giant heap of stuff in the world, it should be with a useful product that’s created sensitively.”

As such, the Chicago-based pair works with three factories in New York; the main one maxes out at approximately 15 employees. “They see us probably more than they want to,” Gabier says. The designers have also started to produce skirts, dresses, shirts, and jackets in Japan and have started to build relationships with knitwear makers in Hong Kong, which they say only gives them a reason to travel there more often. Many of their exceptional fabrics are sourced from couture mills in Europe, and embroidery is often executed by family-run businesses in France.